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We’re Not Going To Do This Perfectly, Folks!!! (or, We Get to Pick the Context)
Ruth Barton
I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. (1)
Anger has its place. Anger shows us where we need boundaries. Anger tells us when something unfair is happening.
Anger gives us strength to overcome impossible situations. Anger helps us hold it together when otherwise we might curl up into a ball and let someone walk all over us.
Anger is waaayyyyyyy better than depression, which is anger turned inward against ourselves.
Sometimes anger is the only way to stay in touch with someone in our human world within our human limitations. You know how when we’re hurt we often just drop people without saying anything? Or we feel hatred toward people?
If we work with our anger we may find the courage to speak our truth or even work things out with people instead of drop them. If we feel our anger we might be able to avoid hatred. Sometimes anger is simply the way toward justice; it’s the energy e-motion that helps us get fierce, get over our fear and actually do something!
It can give us the courage to face what is unbearable. In many cases, anger is us doing our very best to not fly out of our bodies, and to acknowledge our authentic selves in this world with all its frustrations and scare-cities.
Regardless, parts of us really are still living in a 3-D world, and saying things with anger surrounding them still happens when we cannot get to the place which we can officially call “Love.” And in these instances, we must and can instantly forgive ourselves for doing our very best, even when we couldn’t get all the way to lovingkindness. It’s okay. It really is.
We’re all learning to accept and love ourselves for who we are, and one of the main ways we can do this is by dropping self-judgment and forgiving ourselves. If we do not forgive ourselves we can never find the mechanism of our original separation, the switch that we originally flipped to explore life without the apparent constraints of God, to then be able to reverse that decision.
(It’s funny, because since the U.S. Presdential election, it feels like nothing’s happening until I hit a wall! So much of what’s happening is I need to rest from what I now realize really are night battles in my sleep. Otherwise, the wall is judgment. People on one hand seem so much nicer, and on the other meaner. Fascinating times…)
Another way we can love ourselves unconditionally is by setting boundaries. The irony of boundary-setting is that it’s saying No so we can say Yes to ourselves. Paradoxical.
The joy of boundaries is when we set boundaries we say, up to here and no further. If others respect our boundaries, we know an important thing about them and their care for us.
If they do not respect our boundaries, we know that we don’t really have a leg to stand on with them and cannot hold our own ground and still be in peaceful space with them. Then we have another decision to make.
Boundary setting is based on truly honoring and respecting our own feelings. It’s simple yet immensely complicated in a world that has taught us to deny how we really feel. Honoring how we feel, however, means we create safe space for ourselves within the craziness.
By immediately forgiving ourselves we make room for us to be the human beings that we surely are. As soon as we see that we are not worthy of being judged by ourselves, we can immediately drop judging others. And then we don’t have to get mad at them anymore!
I feel a distinct pressure to be perfect from our Company of Heaven friends when they tell us to always remain in Love, especially now, when things are so heavy duty more than ever!
Another part of the deal with Ascension is grappling with our old constructs about doing it perfectly. Those are false structures we create with our minds that have nothing to do with love and everything to do with fearfully entrapping ourselves in an effort to remain safe in the old ways.
Any thought of doing anything perfectly for us humans, at least as far as I can tell, adds stress to what is already very likely a stressful situation. Things are just very stressful right now for many of us.
If we mess up with lovingkindness and react angrily to a fellow human (or ourselves), the best thing we can do is realize it ASAP, apologize, and forgive ourselves immediately, or as soon thereafter as is humanly possible.
If we continue holding ourselves to the impossible perfection standard, we’ll probably argue with ourselves after an anger outburst about why we were right and the other person wrong, because we’re hung up on that crazy perfection construct.
Whereas, if we just realize we made a mistake and we are human, not perfect by any stretch, and we just want to return to Love, well, then, we can admit we made the mistake. We can take responsibility for it, apologize, forgive ourselves, make amends, and return to love.
Otherwise, we’re floundering in fear, trying desperately to remain right or escape the ugly boundaries of this impossible, crazy standard we’ve been holding ourselves to. That perfection is “only” in our own mind.
True perfection lies in Love and connection with God, which are the same thing.
What determines the difference is the context, which we do get to choose.
We can surround ourselves with the context of being “only” human, and therefore we have to set standards of behavior for ourselves because we are not very powerful and need something outside of ourselves to measure us by. In this reality the idea of perfection flourishes.
Or, we can choose the context of unconditional self-love as an unfolding soul in this time of Ascension. We can see our mistakes as a temporary aberration of choosing separateness again that we can return from immediately by recognizing that we need God to be complete.
When we make a mistake it is only one of forgetting that we are part of God; we make it out of mistaken impressions of separateness. When we remind ourselves of our Godselves and that is who we really are, we re-choose the context of unconditional Love and surrender to Who we really are – part of God.
We get to choose our own context. Either we’re “just” human, forever separated, or we’re divine, coming back Home.
We’re not always going to choose perfectly, and that’s all right.
It’s gotta be, because why else are we here other than to remember who we are, which of course implies having forgotten in the first place – the first thing we must self-forgive?
If we already had it down, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be one of the Ascended Masters we’ve been (occasionally) shouting and crying at for more help!
My mother and I have always appreciated Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof, because he argued with God. My mother and I loved that because it was so opposite from our ultra-Protestant upbringings – it was passionate and absolutely full of faith.
In that tradition of discoursing directly with God, I’m introducing the idea of not just arguing, but yelling at, being angry with, God.
This works. I have gotten some of my best results by yelling at God. It works because I find no retribution, no taking it personally, no punishment from God. I just feel entirely welcome, because at least I’m talking with Him.
But what happens is always a transformation! I start by saying out loud how angry I feel, what’s been happening that I feel angry about, and what I want from God. This often includes some yelling, especially letting it all hang out. Saying everything.
And I always feel met, always feel heard, always feel loved. More. I always feel more loved by God after yelling at Him! I believe that S/He feels grateful that I’m communicating my innermost self with Her/Him.
I always feel that welcome, that gratitude. And it is always effective to yell at God. I always get more help, more insight, more clarity. Always.
And that’s because I’ve unconditionally loved myself, including my darker parts, by sharing them with God. I’ve created more of a partnership with my Heavenly Parents.
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It’s so funny that I always figure out later, after I’ve doused the Lord with anger, that it turns out I was actually yelling at a constrictive part of me that I thought was God! It always turns out that the self-restrictive part of me I thought was God was actually the self-sabotaging part of me that I hadn’t owned yet, but which was influencing my life incredibly; it was so powerful, I thought it was God.
God has always been gentle with me when I’ve yelled at Her; I can hear Him chuckling after I’ve spent the anger. Yelling at God has been one of my best things because I get immediate Love.
So now I’m at Peace with God ever more deeply, because God has now turned into my Heavenly Mother and Father, my divine Parents, who love me and lead me and show me the way and are very much in charge when I let them. That’s the part that’s always been in question: who’s in charge here?
I thought I had to be because I was alone here, but it turns out that thought was false. It turns out that I’m plastered to the bosom of my Spiritual Father and Mother and am being carried around and protected and adored, and the part of me that I thought was them is no longer in charge and no longer reflected in my outer world – because I have loved and accepted that part of me.
I’m not doing it perfectly because I can’t and I don’t have to. And the context I’m choosing is being a Daughter of my precious Heavenly Father and Mother who has a lot of wiggle room.
It’s my willingness to accept that I’m not going to do this perfectly – ever – in my own terms that allows me to fall into Grace. Otherwise, I’m still trying. This way, I’m accepting – myself, as a Human Being, and others, as fellow sister and brother humans.
Footnotes
(1) From Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger
(2) Tevye, protagonist in the movie, Fiddler on the Roof. United Artists, 1971. Also a play.